Homelessness and Community Part I: “Home”-lessness, Not “house”-lessness

Homelessness and Community Part I: “Home”-lessness, Not “house”-lessness

Blog

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24/06/19

“You may be homeless if you’re sleeping rough, don’t have rights to stay where you are or you live in unsuitable housing”.

Shelter, Housing charity providing advice, support and legal advice to those precariously housed or homeless

This means that you are homeless if:

You are sofa-surfing, staying
with friends or family

Staying in temporary
accommodation (hostels, shelters, B&B)

Squatting

Living in fear of domestic
violence

Separated from family because you
don’t have a place to live together

Its more than
that though. Homelessness is by definition the absence of a home. But what is a
home? Some say: “Home is where your heart is”. This means nothing to someone
who is sleeping rough and struggling to survive. In this sense home starts off
with the understanding that it is a place where your basic needs are met. We
predominantly find shelter, food, water, warmth, rest in what we would call “home”.
It is also the place where we find safety and security. All of these are our
basic needs and for the vast majority of us these things are associated
predominantly with the notion of “home”.

It is however
possible to satisfy our basic needs outside of the context of the four walls
and a roof under which we live. The Wolverhampton Church Shelter provides all
of these things to a greater or lesser degree to the guests who stay there and
yet they would not call it “home” in any traditional sense of the term.

Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs assumes that once we have found some stability in terms of
those basic needs, the need for social interaction begins to play a bigger
role. Again home is central to this. Home is meant to be the place where we
find a sense of belonging, acceptance and love. It is where we seek to fulfil
our need to belong and feel like we are a part of something that is greater
than just ourselves. It is the epicentre for the nuclear family. It is where in
theory we find a sense of acceptance and love from family members, where we
know that we will not be judged and where forgiveness will always be available.

Sadly, this is
so often not the case. Major studies have found significant links between
homelessness in adult life and traumatic childhoods. For the vast majority of
those who struggle to find a place to live, “home” growing up was not a place
of provision, safety and security. They suffered from abuse, neglect, bullying,
family breakdown, substance misuse, domestic violence and extreme poverty. Many
of them will have sought to find the things that we value in what we call home,
elsewhere. These kinds of issues can lead to gang affiliation, offending
behaviour, sexual promiscuity and many other negative and destructive behaviour
patterns. The lack of formation of a strong bond with a child’s primary
caregiver, often leads to difficulty in forming healthy relationships with
others generally and affects social relationships in later life which can be
extremely dysfunctional.

Interestingly,
our experience of tackling homelessness is somewhat at odds with Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs. He suggests that our basic needs for things such as shelter
are more important than our social needs. Yet tenancies given to rough sleepers
often breakdown apparently because their need for community is greater than
their need for stability, security and shelter.

When you take a person who is sleeping rough and place them in a flat, you may be removing them from their community. Even among people sleeping rough there is a sense of community. Unless you put something in place to provide them with a new community, they will often end up gravitating back to sleeping rough. The issue is not one of house-lessness, rather homelessness. Putting a roof over someone’s head does not provide them with the sense of acceptance and belonging that is needed to find a home. In these circumstances, it actually often alienates them from those things. Homelessness and community have to be understood together if we are to tackle such a prevalent issue in contemporary society.

Understanding such considerations has to be at the heart of how we shape our homelessness services for the future.